[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
My own example would be a photograph by Andr Kertsz, depict-
ing the back of a black-coated man in front of a broken park bench.
Almost every one who looks at this picture feels a sense of menace,
yet there is not a single element in the image that is menacing per se.
Photography is such a surreal medium because similar transitions from the
actual to the imagined occur so regularly. This is a very important point but
one which is difficult to explain with clarity. We must delight in the fact that
there is such irony in the camera, which is presumed to be such a banal fact-
recorder, throws out such strangeness with such ease and frequency. No
wonder the Surrealists were so enamoured with photography; they under-
stood this quirkiness of the medium perhaps more profoundly than its prac-
titioners. As Andre Breton, who wrote the First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924,
said: Surrealism is contained in reality itself.
It is certainly a wonder to cherish that strangeness need not be prefab-
ricated. It arises naturally from the way the camera sees the world.
One of my all-time favorite photographers is Bill Brandt who often wrote
about this topic. He talked of seeing the world as familiar yet strange; he
marvelled at the spell that charged the commonplace ; he reveled in the
fact that the camera is much more than a recording apparatus. It is a me-
dium via which messages reach us from another world. It is no coincidence
that Brandt personally knew many of the Surrealists.
We could spend the remainder of this text extolling the virtues of this
strange link between reality and the camera s images but we should
move on.
I want to raise another attribute of the fine photographer. It is the
tricky topic of quantity. It seems to me that one of the important char-
acteristics is that he/she can sustain an idea over a long period of
time through many, many images. The obvious conclusion to be drawn
from this statement is that the better photographers shoot a lot of
pictures. And that is true.
MERIT, AND WHY IT IS SO RARE " 55
In his own inimicable way, George Bernard Shaw once remarked that a
photographer is like a cod which lays a million eggs in order that one may
survive. This remark has been wrongly employed by critics to attest that any
fool who shoots enough pictures will eventually take a good one. True, but
only one good one. Even a dog, fitted with a programmed motor-drive cam-
era would probably take a good photograph, in time. But that is not the
point.
The story which best exemplifies the idea of the value of quantity concerns a
Chinese artist who was commissioned to paint a picture of a fish for a wealthy
client. Months went by and the painting was not supplied. In frustration the
client accosted the artist in his home and demanded an explanation. In reply
the artist took a brush and pad and in a few deft strokes produced a beauti-
ful image of a fish.
The client was still dissatisfied: how could anything so simple be valuable?
In reply, again, the artist beckoned the client to a cupboard, opened the
door, and out spilled thousands of paintings of fish, the essential precur-
sors to the final image. So it is in photography.
In photography quantity goes hand-in-hand with quality. Sustaining
concentration on a subject or idea over a long period of time is the
photographer s way of becoming absolutely familiar and in perfect
empathy with the picture-producing situation. Only then, with confi-
dence, can the photographer be supportive of the image, assured that
the struggle with the subject through many attempts has produced a
satisfying picture at the limits of his/her abilities.
It would be a mistake to think that only street photographers work in this way.
All photographers must pay homage to the subject through a quantity of
images. Take the case of Harry Callahan s simple, elegant study of grasses
in the snow. Callahan did not merely stumble across the subject, take a
single negative, and move on. His archives (at the Center for Creative Pho-
tography, Arizona) contain scores of contact proof prints of exactly the same
subject with minor variations; in fact he took over 500 photographs of twigs
56 " ON LOOKING AT PHOTOGRAPHS: DAVID HURN & BILL JAY
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]